Men love lists. As such I ask you: who’s the greatest baller in basketball history?

I don’t feel qualified to comment on Bill Russell, who retired the year I was born (1969). Francesa said Russell must top any logical list by dint of his dynastic Celtics. (And though the Celtics toppled Wilt Chamberlain countless times, Russell did little to stunt the Stilt). And, if I may, Mike also said Russell was flanked by up to eight Hall of Famers.

Michael Jordan had one – Scottie Pippen – who, honestly, has a bronze bust because he straddled Jordan’s faerie dust to Springfield. Dennis Rodman was on the back nine of his career when he joined Jordan, who already had a three-peat in his hip pocket before the eccentric, spray-painted, rebounding savant toured with basketball’s Beatles.

Jordan’s soaring, scissor-legged visage is as vital as Jerry West’s silhouette on the NBA’s logo. If you’re too young to recall Jordan, I’m sorry. What you missed was an athletic deity whose disdain for defeat was so savage that he couldn’t accept losing an innocuous game of golf to a geriatric Chuck Daly during the Dream Team’s romp through Barcelona – appearing at the iconic coach’s door at five o’clock the next morning, demanding a rematch.

Jordan’s 38-point explosion against Utah in the 1998 finals while crippled by flu, an IV jammed into his arm at halftime, puking what little fluids were left in his body, Pippen literally lugging Jordan over his shoulder off the court when the game ended, is the avatar of his allergy to losing.

Francesa said Oscar Robertson sat in the studio and claimed he was better than Jordan, which, to me, disqualifies him on the spot. Only Muhammad Ali, the premier provocateur of the 20th Century, can stand on the prerogative of such proclamations.

Jerry West, on any top-ten list, whose gallant but morbid memoir was just published, is quintessential proof of the human paradox. Perhaps the most decorated man in league history, who (as player and GM) has almost infinite rings and regalia, more money than he can spend, has never been happy one day in his transcendent life. West, whose record needs no recount, is quite kind to Kobe Bryant and compares the current champion nonpareil to Jordan, though West admits he’s Bryant’s de facto father, which also excludes him from objective assessment.

Can you imagine if Jordan had Shaq instead of Bill Wennington and Cartwright? In the era of free agent pinball, with loyalty tethered to the highest bidder, where winning is nice but trumped by price, Jordan won six championships with an amalgam of glorified role players, like Wennington, John Paxson, Steve Kerr, Luc Longley, and Toni Kukoc. (Insert clever Caucasian punch line here.)

Kobe Bryant, as turgid, tempestuous, and likeable as Terrell Owens, is an unquestioned assassin whose manic mores on the hardwood are only surpassed by Jordan. But he is Jordan-Lite. If cornered and candid, my guess is Kobe would admit it, since his game (according to West) has been a singular dedication to duplicating Jordan’s mojo and on-court countenance. But there can only be one Greatest, as Ali has taught us.

Jordan is so sublime that John Starks’s greatest moment was dunking on Jordan – during a series the Knicks lost. The woes of Jordan’s foes were such that they found fantasy in failure, half-truths in the hard truth that Jordan wasn’t just more talented than you, but so hardwired to competition, so addicted that he abdicated his role as Lord of the Rings to take swings for the Birmingham Barons, where he found that a changeup was more than a metaphor, where not even Gods beat the odds.

Despite the ornate oratories about the Big Apple, New York was built by blue-collar ethics far more than the marble of Madison Avenue. And Jordan, despite his physical splendor, was more gritty than pretty. He was appropriately born in Brooklyn. Sadly, he just happened to wear the wrong pro uniform.

The recently departed Al Davis gave words to the American mantra: Just win, baby. Michael Jeffrey Jordan was a six-time champion in six chances, and was the MVP of every series.

One Comment

This is such a nice read.
I got to see mj only on cable here in the Philippines and that was a phenomenon like no other, even today can’t be seen anymore.
I hate it when some makes the endorsements of mj seem like he is just like that and he is overhyped, forgetting how the guy got his butt off during practise, swallowd criticisms and just play hard and real basketball, day in and out!
FOR THOSE MOMENTS OF MJ WERE CLASSIC, those too young to get it, i feel sorry for them..their new idols now are just arrogants and blame it to you faces!

Omg! Spray painted savant? You got me rolling with that one JK! I can’t cite statistics, championships or games but Julius Erving was the man (maybe not the greatest) for me. I actually got to see Dr. J play several times when he with the Nets. MJ was the definitely the best of his time but I was turned off by his constant foul grubbing to the refs.

This article did two things for me: it made me recall just how enthralled I was watching MJ and by extension the rest of the NBA in the 90’s, and it also showed just how much of a foil MJ is to the current landscape of gutless, conceited, and cowardly stars of today’s NBA.

The Lebron “Decision” was the most telling of what the NBA has become. Lebron’s modus operandi is that if he’s not winning, the answer is that he needs a new team (and one with a co-superstar) rather than a look at his game, how he utilizes supporting players, his defense, his poise under big time pressure, etc. I suspect other NBA stars have a similar mindset, unfortunately. As evident by his parting comments after losing in the finals last year, Lebron seems to think this criticism stems from his larger than life figure and not from the way he plays the game. What he doesn’t realize is that people don’t criticism him because of his fame and stature, we dislike him because we still remember what the league used to be under MJ, Magic, Bird, Isiah, Wilt, Russle, Clyde, Frazier, etc., and we want that back.

Jalen Rose, John Wall, Blake Griffin, and all the up and coming young guys: if you think the fame and money is what got MJ out of bed every morning, you’d be wrong.